I am growing more and more fond of Slax. Slax is a “live” (as in “live CD”) GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware that is simple, fast, powerful, and flexible. Its worth was evident to me right from the beginning.
As of now, I do not have internet access on phoenix, my new home desktop system. Therefore, when I get online for purposes that are not directly related to my work, I must seek to get online elsewhere: Internet cafés, or even the computer at my parents’. The problem is that all those systems run some incarnation of Windows, and thus they are annoyingly limited in their abilities to do something meaningful. Plus, I need my toolbox to be handy ;).
For all those cases, Slax lets me have a full, working GNU/Linux system in a USB Memory Stick, and even provides a 4MB boot CD image for use in systems unable to boot from USB. The standard software collection is useful but rather limited; but then, there are a lot of “modules” that work more or less like packages to customize your environment. You can convert Slackware’s *.tgz packages to modules with a handy tgz2mo utility. And all in all, Slax is based on Slackware, the distribution I use on my systems, so everything is familiar territory.
Thanks to Slax, I was able to get meaningfully productive almost everywhere without touching the underlying Windows installation of the host computers. You simply carry your system in your pocket to be used as needed. This kind of convenience is priceless. Don’t leave home without it :D.
Back when RedHat abandoned their early live-run software on distro CDs, I though it was not a good move, even though I didn’t use it much. When others began creating distros for that very purpose, I was somewhat relieved. Having used both the Debian-based and FreeBSD-based live CDs, I can see the importance of such tools. That we are now advancing to USB stick distros and who-knows-what next, personal security and privacy, not to mention the convenience of real software tools at hand, is a real blessing to me. It’s not a matter of needing it right now, but simply knowing I can do it when I do need. Knowing there are yet so many older machines out there, I still pray for a console distro with all the familiar goodies possible. Put *that* in a live-run format!
Ed, that has already been done. Check Slax in its “Frodo” edition (no frills, console-only, 53 M ISO size), and you can add these modules to it… 🙂